The popularity of social media websites or portals, such as Facebook®, Twitter®, and others has increased markedly in recent years, compelling marketers and advertisers to analyze the potential of these channels for marketing their products and services. These portals provide a platform for individual users to interact, and at the same time present organizations with potential marketing tools, such as Facebook® pages, or Twitter® handles, enabling marketers to interact with social media “followers.” Marketers can post messages or advertisements on these social media systems as a way to advertise outside traditional marketing channels. Members, in turn, can respond by clicking on embedded links, replying to the messages, starting posts based on the messages, or performing other site-specific functions. Further, marketers can embed an organization-specific or marketing campaign-specific URL (webpage address) within the messages, driving users and web traffic to a separate web site.
Even though viral marketing through these social media systems can prove profitable for organizations in terms of additional media coverage, and greater brand awareness, organizations may face difficulties in maintaining and managing content associated with more than one brand category on a given social media system on an ongoing basis. As described here and in greater detail below, a “brand category” relates to a classification of content associated with a given marketer or organization. For example, a brand category for a given company could be retail or franchise locations associated with or operated by the company, product lines within the company, customer segments, trademarks, etc. Within each brand category are individual “brand items”, such as individual retail locations, specific products within a product line, etc. (e.g., a Miami store location could be a “brand item” within the “retail locations” brand category). Further, the content associated with a given brand item on a social media system could be text posts, photos, videos, coupons, and other similar types of content related to the brand item and displayed on a social media system web page or account. Details associated with brand items and brand categories are described in greater detail below.
For marketers (e.g., companies, organizations, individuals, etc.), the task of updating and managing social media system pages or accounts associated with these brand categories, and the individual brand items within each category, with new advertising content on a regular basis can become overwhelming. Moreover, management of the social media system content requires a large team of administrators spread across the organization or its franchises. These administrators may have little to no interaction with each other, causing them to follow their own marketing templates, social media page organization schemes, content styles, and other features, which destroys uniformity and brand consistency for the marketer. Additionally, organizations may wish to post common content relating to aspects of the organization that affect all brand categories (such as company-wide sales and promotions, advertisements, etc.), but while preserving local content associated with specific brand items within brand categories (e.g., promotions specific to local franchise locations). Currently no social media system allows organizations to link their content associated with many different brand categories on potentially many different social media system pages or accounts in a cohesive manner to provide a consistent user experience.
Additionally, because marketing data and metrics associated with success or performance of various promotions, advertisements, social media system displays, etc., are spread across multiple social media system pages or accounts, analysis and comparison of the brand items may be cumbersome. No existing service effectively assists marketers and advertisers in managing, structuring and displaying data associated with their brand categories and associated brand items in an integrated and coherent fashion.
Therefore, a long-felt but unresolved need exists for a system or method that structures and integrates third party brand items and social media system pages, displays, or accounts associated with those brand items so as to provide a consistent experience for both social media system members and marketer content administrators. There remains a further need for a system or method that is simple to implement, does not require extensive data analysis, and can be easily configured according to an administrator's preferences.